Under the Harrow: (15 page)

I
TAKE THE TRAIN
back to London the next morning. What at night was rounded and storybook (shape of barn, shape of tree) is now sodden, thin, and colorless. The fields are pale, the house paint faded against the bleached sky. After we pass Faversham, I call Lewis. “His wife thinks he did it,” I say.

“Yes, she does. It looks like we’re going to charge him, Nora.”

I wonder if the police have told my dad about the arrest. I hope they won’t be able to find him again. I don’t think I will be able to bear helping him in and out of the courtroom, watching him shuffle to his seat. I have a surge of anger then. Where’s my family? I think. Where’s
my
family?

The detectives and a solicitor from the Crown Prosecution Service will assemble the case against Keith Denton. Lewis says the case will move to trial only if the prosecution has an excellent chance of winning.

The next few days will be spent examining any weaknesses in the evidence, he says, and searching out possible defenses. The police will review the circumstances around the crime, the details that are not relevant to the trial but will help win the confidence of the jury. When they finish, the prosecutor will decide if the case will go to trial.

I decide to wait for the news in Marlow, and the prospect turns me restless. In a room in Abingdon someone is going to sit down with a file and decide what happens next. I can’t go talk to this person. I can’t plead with her.

At the Hunters, I find the names of the dozen prosecutors
in Oxford who might have been assigned to her case, and consider approaching them. Their stakes are different from ours. I wonder how many cases Oxford CPS brings to trial every year. What would losing one mean? A bad day, a drink after work, at worst, a professional review.

None of their addresses are listed. They must not want certain people to know where they live. But I could follow them home from the CPS office or Abingdon police station. I imagine the thud of a car door, their polished shoes tapping on the walk, and following them through the open gate, saying, Excuse me.

They wouldn’t listen, and my desperation might only make things worse. I can’t do anything for her. I remember her weight in my arms. The hours drag by. They have seven days to decide. Lewis is going to call me with the decision, and I try not to see portents everywhere.

 • • • 

Lewis calls me in the evening.

“Have they made a decision?”

“No, it’s something else,” he says. “The chief inspector has agreed to release her body. You can call the coroner to make arrangements.”

T
HE DRIVE TAKES
six hours, and by the time I reach Polperro it is dark. I park on a steep, narrow road behind the Crumplehorn Inn and collect the box of ashes from the footwell. I wish we had done this differently, with a coffin and pallbearers. I shouldn’t be able to lift the box on my own, but I can, and then I am carrying it down the cobbled streets to the Green Man, a lime-washed inn by the harbor where I will spend the night.

At dawn tomorrow I will scatter the ashes in the cove below the house we rented. I chose Cornwall because it is where she intended to go, five weeks ago. She had already rented a flat on the other side of the county. I have the address in St. Ives, but I think seeing it might tip me over some last, final barricade, and I don’t know what things would be like afterward.

I can’t manage to think of them as her ashes. Instead the box is something she has entrusted to my care, and I am scared something will happen to me before I can complete the errand. On the M5 I thought I would crash and now, as I turn the corner and the Green Man comes into view, I am sure it will burn down with us inside. It wouldn’t be the worst thing. Her ashes would still end up in the ocean, floating with the cinders in long fingers of smoke over the sea.

 • • • 

Before dawn, I carry the box along the flagged stones of the quay. In the inner harbor, the tide is in, and sailing boats rock on the silvery water, their rigging clinking against the masts. The slate roofs seem to glow in the darkness. The sky is just
beginning to lighten at the horizon as I circle around the inner harbor, and I can see the black outline of the two umbrella pines.

I climb the coast path along the edge of the headland. At its highest point I turn to look back at Polperro. More lights have come on, and smoke curls from the chimneys. I look at the fisherman’s croft, nearly invisible against the rocks, and at the two square merchant’s houses. One white, the other tweed-brown, though in this light the white one is blue, and the tweed one black.

The sand of the path crunches beneath my boots. Wind rustles the low sage pines on the headland. The coast doesn’t look very different from in summer, since so much of it is evergreen. I listen to the boom of the waves at the base of the cliff.

After a half mile, the coast path curves around a familiar white oak. Its branches creak with a sound like a door opening.

Another, shorter stretch and then a house comes into view, set down from the path by the edge of the cliff. Our house! I worried it wouldn’t be here anymore.

The house is empty. The man who owns it spends most of the year in London. There are still colored buoys hanging from a tree at the edge of the property. There is the outdoor shower, its spigot foxed with mold, its crooked door on the latch. And the clothesline, a wire strung between two whitewashed poles. In this light the wire is invisible, the pegs floating in midair against the sea. I remember pegging up my swimsuit, with wet hair, wearing a blue dress sprigged with white flowers.

The sense of recognition propels me forward until I stand on the back porch, facing the sea, and then it begins to fracture, so while I am surveying the house, I am also worrying about the prosecutor’s decision, and I am pleading for Rachel’s life, and I am thinking about how we planned to come back here. We wanted to come back for years and years, until we were both old.

The staircase vanishes down the cliff to the sea, and I imagine that Rachel is climbing the steps. Forty years on. The sea below her, the rivulets in the cliff. A formidable old woman, with her hair wet from an early swim. She puts her hand on the railing and leans back to check if she can see her sister, her children, her
grandchildren, if any of them has come to the edge of the lawn to wait for her.

I cross the damp lawn and carry the box down the seventy-one steps to the beach. I remove my shoes and socks. I wait until the sun comes over the eastern headland, then twist the lid from the box and walk to the edge of the surf. The icy water stings my skin and soaks through my jeans. I throw handfuls of ash into the water. There is little wind and the things that I worried might happen do not. Most of the ash sinks below the water and the particles that float on the surface are soon roiled by the next wave. Sunlight floods the cove and the waves and the few offshore clouds with color. It takes me a while to recognize that what I feel is disappointment. I had hoped so much for a signal from her.

When I finish, I kneel to rinse my hands and the box in the water. I hold my hands in the clear cold water for longer than necessary, until long after the last of the ash is rinsed away.

 • • • 

On the porch, I use a glove to wipe the sand and water from my blue feet. I pull on woolen socks and roll my sodden jeans down over them. My teeth chatter. My mind is blank. She’s gone.

I zip my coat to my chin and rock back and forth. I am so cold that I go around the house to the outdoor shower. How good it would feel to take off my wet socks and jeans and stand under a jet of steaming water. I twist the tap but nothing happens. The water must be shut off to keep the pipes from freezing.

I return to the porch, which has the most sun. The day will grow warmer as it rises. Behind me are the rooms where she slept for three weeks, the rooms where she cooked, the rooms where she read. During our trip, Rachel was reading Clarice Lispector and I was alternating between John Fowles and the soggy detective novels in the cabinet under the stairs. Every morning one of us walked to the bakery for almond croissants and I ate mine here with my book. I broke the horn of the croissant and licked out the marzipan. Ahead of me, trenches of ocean rose and fell for miles.

At night I watched the stars from the hammock and was
scared by the size of the universe as I hadn’t been since I was little. Rachel climbed in next to me, tucking my socked feet under her arm, pulling a blanket over her chest, and the two of us stared out.

It was good to be so scared. The ocean was very large, as was the universe. Which contained the ocean. And the oceans on other planets, and other planets. The fear made the domestic rituals better. The almond croissant, the detective novel, the outdoor shower. Here I am, I thought, taking an outdoor shower in the universe.

While we were here, I wanted to stay forever, but I was also already thinking of leaving. Always biding and always going, always at the exact same time.

“What’s your favorite thing about Cornwall?” I asked her, but it wasn’t what I meant, I meant what’s your favorite thing about being alive.

I
N POLPERRO,
birds wheel over the masts of boats in the inner harbor. On the decks, a few men smoke as they ready their boats for the day, and I listen to their voices and the rigging clinking. I decide to stay in Cornwall for the next four days. There is no reason to return to Oxford until the prosecutor’s decision, and their deadline is five days from now.

 • • • 

For the next four days, I acted as though I were still scattering her ashes, and should visit only the places here she loved best. This meant a lot of driving.

I visited the rivers Fowey, Fal, and Helford. I ate at St. John’s in Fowey at sunset, as the windows across the estuary in Polruan became shimmering brass squares. I ordered what she would have ordered, which was rainbow trout. The drink was more difficult, and from her three favorites I chose a white Bordeaux.

I visited Frenchman’s Creek. I visited the fishing town of Cadgwith. I tried to find the falls she had talked about on the Lizard Peninsula, but couldn’t. It may have dried up. No one I asked had heard of a dark pink lighthouse either. She may have told me the wrong color, or I remembered it wrong. I visited Porthgwidden and found the stall where she bought buttered crumpets.

I visited Redruth. I visited Lostwithiel and Padstow. I rode the ferry across the bay. This was a pattern I could follow for the rest of my life. I could retrace her steps. I could visit the hostel where she stayed in Greece and try to track down the
man she met there. She lost his number when she was on the train north, which she always said was a blessing in disguise, but maybe it wasn’t.

One by one I could replace my tastes with hers. I don’t like mussels, for example, but I ordered them in a restaurant she liked in Cadgwith and finished the bowl. I could sleep with the men she would have slept with. I could become a nurse, even. It’s not like I already have a career.

And maybe that’s what I would do, if she were in prison. If what happened that day was that she killed someone instead of the other way around. I would do what she wanted me to and then tell her about it in detail. We often confused memories. It was easy if you talked for long enough.

 • • • 

On my last night, I visited Mousehole, and on the drive back it began to snow. It almost never snows in Cornwall, and I held my breath, hoping it wouldn’t stop. I drove over hills, across the peninsula.

At the edge of a town I hadn’t seen before was an old-fashioned Esso station, the two narrow pumps, the glowing lozenges atop them. Snow drifted over the empty filling station. The road was wet and black along its center and white at its edges, where the snow hadn’t been touched. The gothic spires of a church tower were almost invisible against the night sky. The glowing sign for a garage stood beside the filling station, and other signs—RAC Repairer, Community House—hung from wrought-iron hooks on the edges of the buildings. An old car sat with its headlights, two orbs mounted on the round wells of its tires, switched on.

 • • • 

As soon as I cross the bridge over the river Tamar, I want to turn back. I want to keep drifting around Cornwall. It would be a happy life. I could visit Frenchman’s Creek in a thunderstorm. I could find the dark pink lighthouse. After a heavy rain, a falls will appear somewhere on the Lizard Peninsula. A sudden fan of silver water, spraying between the green headlands, twisting down the side of a black ravine.

I could order the scallops at St. John’s. They were her second choice, and she had a hard time deciding.

The bridge span rattles under the tires. Far below, chunks of ice and snow float on the water. Ahead of me is the Devon side. I want to stay in Cornwall, but Rachel was not arrested, she isn’t in prison, and I will never be able to feed her my memories.

As I drive east, the calm of the past four days is replaced by dread. The prosecutors will announce their decision tomorrow. I keep thinking that I need to call someone to make sure that the charge isn’t lowered from murder to manslaughter. I keep doing the maths based on the different minimum sentence lengths, to find out how old he will be when he gets out, how old I will be.

I drive toward Keith Denton’s house. I pretend that someone knows where I am. I pretend I have been trained and somewhere the people who trained me are standing in a great stone house, thin women in black suits with cigarettes and men smoking cigars and looking out the window at the rain, my spymasters, my superintendents.

T
HE SHINGLED HOUSE APPEARS
empty. Natasha and the two boys are likely still in Margate, and Keith is at the station in Abingdon, unless they moved him to the nick in Oxford. The dog didn’t come to the door in Margate, I wonder if they kenneled her or if Natasha has already given her away to punish him.

A stain spreads across the gravel below where he parked the van. I stand for a long time looking down at it, though I know I’m being ridiculous, it can’t be her blood. The stain must be fuel or motor oil. I crouch down and lift a handful of gravel, which has the sharp scent of petrol.

When I am halfway up the drive, a man comes out of the house next door, and we stare at each other. He is about forty. He has a shaved head and wears an anorak. I recognize him from town, though I don’t know where. He shifts his weight, watching me. After a few moments, he continues down to the road. I let my breath out. I wonder if he would have stopped me if Keith were at home, or if I were carrying a hammer wrapped in plastic.

Once the neighbor turns on Redgate, I continue to the front door. I open the letter box and sort through the past few days of post. Nothing personal has arrived for Keith, no envelopes with handwritten addresses. I decide to continue checking it while he is in custody, on the slight chance that something useful might arrive.

There is not much to look at in his garden. A shed, a cherry tree, which in spring will froth with white or pink blossom. In
one corner is a stack of boxes, and I pull the drawers open. An apiary, of all things. I consider the dry honeycombs and the white resin and imagine him showing up at Rachel’s house with a stupid grin and a chunk of fresh, dripping honeycomb wrapped in paper. “Just thought you might like it.” I open one of the drawers and spit in it.

One of them left a recycling bin by the back door. The police must have gone through his rubbish weeks ago, and I wonder if they searched it again after arresting him. Bottles of white wine and cans of Strongbow. No Tennent’s Light Ale. No proof yet that he watched her from the ridge. I replace the bottles and cans gently, to avoid attracting the neighbors’ attention.

They had an affair, or he fixated on her, or some combination of the two. He stalked her. He watched her from the ridge, and offered to do jobs at her house, and stole the photographs. He wasn’t in any of them, which would make them strange mementos of a relationship.

I cup my hands around my eyes and look through a window. The kitchen clearly belongs to a family. If they did have an affair, Rachel would never have come here.

There would be plenty of other meeting places. They would meet at isolated countryside inns or at hotels in London, even in Oxford. I imagine them setting off at different times down the aqueduct and, far from the village, after the hazel copse, stumbling off the path and pressing against a tree.

I can imagine her in an affair but not with him. He doesn’t fit the role. I can’t imagine her doing anything risky or desperate for him, and she would hate him for betraying his wife.

The more I think about it, the more I think she isn’t the type for any of it, not the subterfuge, not the narcotic obsession of an affair. Other people’s delusions disgusted her.

Alice had an affair with one of our teachers, and I can’t imagine Rachel doing any of what she did, walking by his house, for example, and seeing that he was home with his family and telling him to meet her around the corner and fuck her in her car. The teacher was crazy about her. Alice put an end to it, and he said, “But we were going to go to the beach together.” I felt sorry
for him, but Rachel didn’t. “Sad fuck,” she said. She didn’t understand why he insisted on lying to his wife instead of leaving.

I think Rachel made Keith feel foolish. I think she made him feel foolish at a point when he couldn’t recover from it, he had hoped for too much. He proposed something to her and she laughed or told him off, and it was too late, she was already precious to him.

He came home afterward, I think. He showered and washed his clothes. It would seem safer to do here than anywhere else. He must have left traces everywhere, in the pipes, in the floorboards. The police didn’t look hard enough for evidence. It is there somewhere, in the pipes, and they should have torn the house apart to get to it.

Before I leave the property, I return to the shed for the secateurs and trim the cherry tree until there is not much of it left.

 • • • 

I go to the Duck and Cover, but there isn’t any news. The bartender tells me that as far as anyone knows Keith has not been released. Snow begins to fall on the town, and we both turn to watch it. It falls heavily, not like in Cornwall. The half-timbered houses across the road look, for a moment, ancient, and the people on the pavement have the defined features and heavy gazes of people in old paintings. Their eyes are dark and serious as they look up and across the road toward us, to see what the snow has already done, what it will go on to do.